lordaardvarksfm
patreon
September 11 2020 - Progress Report & Google Drive Release
🕑 Added 2020-09-11 20:18:18 +0000 UTC
Hey all!
Before I begin, a few apologies:
First, for the lack of an update last week. Those of you who follow me on Twitter are likely aware that last week was spent pretty much entirely on a new workflow, and so I didn't have anything (or any time) to post an update. It wasn't until Monday that I even realized I never posted an update.
Second, for the low-quality update image. Last night, I was in the process of getting high-quality renders for this update image (and getting some never-before-seen images as well), but my PC locked up hard and I had to force-power-down. I went to bed then cuz it was 3AM, and I woke up to my RAID array being damaged and needing to be repaired. This is a process that takes about 6 hours, during which time I cannot access the drive. It's my work drive, meaning I can't access SFM. So I had to take these images (and in some cases, literal screenshots) off Twitter.
With all that being said, let’s get into the meat and potatoes!
The Gentle Pipeline
If you follow my Twitter, then as I stated above, you’re likely already at least passingly familiar with this. For those who don’t, and those who aren’t, though, let me lead with this: The Gentle Pipeline will massively speed up production time for future projects.
Got your attention? Good. Give me a moment to explain why and how.
Gentle is an academic program specifically designed for taking audio of someone talking, a transcript of what they said, and then precisely generating and aligning the phonemes that are spoken. For posterity, “phonemes” are the individual sounds we make during speech – “Oo”, “Ah”, “Mm”, “Ff”, etc.
The astute among you may already see the significance of this, but for those who don’t: up until now, all of my videos’ lip-sync has been done entirely by hand. The method that I use for lip-syncing uses “Phoneme” presets, which are collections of face-shapes designed to match those the human face makes when making those aforementioned phonemes, like “Oo”, “Ah”, “Mm”, and “Ff.” I would scrub through the audio, one frame at a time, listening with my ear as to what phoneme is being spoken, and then apply the appropriate preset to get the face to match the sound being made.
This is an extremely slow and tedious process. And it’s a process that, coincidentally, the program Gentle does automatically – and, most of the time, with far higher precision than I could ever hope to accomplish.
And so, for most of the week from August 27 to September 3, I had bunkered down and done a lot of research and development in ways to utilize Gentle to automate this process. After writing three entire tools from scratch, to be used alongside Gentle, and three painful days trying to get Gentle to run on my PC at all, I finally finished it: The Gentle Pipeline.
I will spare you the details (you can watch this installation video and this use video if you’re masochistic enough to want them), and instead just leave you with this small snippet from the September 5 live-stream, where I exercised this tool to lip-sync to automatically lip-sync 4 seconds of dialogue with a single button-press. Classically, my rule of thumb for this has been “1 second of dialogue takes 1 minute to lip-sync.” Which means that, yes, 10 minutes of dialogue would roughly take me 10 hours to lip-sync by hand. And that’s not including breaks or distractions, which are plentiful because lip-syncing is not exactly the most engaging process.
Now, with the Gentle Pipeline, I can likely get it done in about 5 minutes.
My Next Project: Rachel x Chaos
Similarly, if you follow my Twitter (are you sensing a theme here?), then you have likely noticed that I have been unusually active this past week, sharing content mostly of a similar theme.
Indeed, the images used for this post’s update image are taken from those tweets.
Those who are coming in from the $5 tier know this, but those below that tier are likely less in the know: but in a nutshell, the past few months have been rife with me feeling aimless, demotivated, and frustrated with the way my projects are going. I have been searching for a holy grail, something to reinvigorate my interest in storytelling.
For the past few weeks I’ve been honing in on the project Overbreed, which is likely what I will start 2021 off with. But I’ve had an issue with doing it next: due to the postponement of Phazon Addendum B (still to be rewritten and renamed), and cancellation of other projects, that would result with only a single video (Liziverse Episode 1) being between two Overwatch videos. And I’m not comfortable with that. I did it once already with Rabbit.Hole Episodes 2 and 3 (again due to cancellations… sensing a theme here, too?), and I did not like it at all.
But for this next project, I wanted something bombastic. Something intense, exciting, incredible. Something eyebrow-raising.
Since early August, I have been pursuing a potential idea, pairing the demon-huntress Rachel from Ninja Gaiden with an 8-foot-tall, four-armed hulk of a demon with a massive 23-inch joystick. I didn’t know how it’d work, I didn’t know what the story would be, but I knew that I wanted to do it—if it could be done.
Over the next few weeks, I had slowly put together experiments between them. Testing ways to get a cock bigger than her head into her mouth, testing the viability of the extreme motions necessary, and of the various fantastical elements required to pull such a pairing off. Those are what I have been sharing on Twitter.
Outside of Twitter, I had also been brainstorming, outlining, and writing. Over the past few days, I have been sharing glimpses into that as well.
At this point in time, I am confident enough with the project to officially commit to it and greenlight it. It doesn’t have a name yet, and is being referred to internally as Rachaos, but that isn’t uncommon. Fair Market Value didn’t have a name until I was exporting it out of Premiere to upload to PornHub.
In brief, the story for Rachaos is as such: Rachel has taken on a job to hunt down and bring in a notoriously elusive fiend – a Psychomorph, capable of distorting both itself and the environment around it to match its target’s deepest desires. When Rachel confronts the Psychomorph, he takes on the form of the big boy seen in the Patreon update image, and assures Rachel that they are in a place where reality holds no meaning—only her passion bears truth, and her lust sculpts the very laws of nature in this place. All of which leads to a very hentai-inspired hyperreal display of sex, sweat, semen, and swearing; and fitting impossibly large sticks in holes that all intuition would suggest are far too small to fit them.
For those who want more juicy details, then this segues into the final point of today’s update perfectly: the Google Drive.
The Google Drive
A few weeks ago, I put together a public Google Drive for sharing all of my recent writings, in a bid of total transparency. This came about as a part of the aforementioned restlessness, where I had a few weeks of writing in a flurry of ideas, trying to find something that sticks. Rather than let all the ideas go to waste, I decided to share them.
At the time, the Google Drive was released to my $5 WIP tier, because it was—and still is—an unfinished work in progress. The projects being uploaded to it, such as Overbreed, have far more information in my head than I have committed to them yet. I wanted to write them down before I brought the Google Drive down to the $2 Writing tier.
But as time marched on and Rachaos began to take form—to say nothing of Liziverse or the Gentle Pipeline—it became clear to me that waiting until Overbreed in particular is fully written is a fool’s errand. That will likely take until both Liziverse and Rachaos are released and out the door, and I have no other distractions to chip away at my time.
And so, I decided to push a few updates to the Google Drive, and then release it exactly as-is right now, to you all at the $2 tier and above.
You can find the link here. It is split into 3 sections: Bibles, Screenplays, and Notes.
Bibles are massive collections of notes for similarly massive projects, such as Overbreed and Blue Star. Currently, only Overbreed’s Bible is uploaded (and incomplete, as mentioned before).
Screenplays are the actual text files that I use as a master file for putting together animations and directing voice actors. They are the text representation of the video you watch on your device.
And Notes is everything that falls into neither category. For larger projects this can be an entire collection of corollary media; for smaller projects, perhaps nothing more than a high-level SparkNote of what the screenplay will include.
I implore and encourage you all to peruse it at your leisure. Of relevance to this particular post, check the Rachaos screenplay in the Screenplay folder for a low-level nitty-gritty view of the first 69 (nice) shots of the projects (before revisions); and then check the Rachaos high-level in the Notes folder for an overview of what all is yet to be done. In the high-level notes, the screenplay reaches up to and concludes “Chapter III: Taste of Chaos”, with the remaining 5 chapters yet to be written.
That’s all for now. For posterity, I will once again drop the link to the Google Drive here at the bottom of this post:
Google Drive Link
Comments
Ethranoch
Not on Twitter anymore, so first I'm seeing the Rachel stuff. Love it and can't wait to see it.
Lyner
Thats awesome that you found a way to do better lip syncing. As well as probably allievate some stress too. Thanks for the google drive link will have to check that out. Looking forward to Rachaos and Lizverse. Keep on keeping on dude!
